The new iO schedule just came out. New schedules come out every two months, and that's how teams find out when their shows will be and, to put it bluntly, if they still exist at the theater.

Here's, (hopefully) quickly, how iO works. There's a training center. Students take classes. After a year of study some students are pulled from the training center and put on teams (it used to be that nearly everyone made it on a team eventually, but with the glut of students there are less and less spots for new teams and new performers). The theater decides who will be on what teams (and by "the theater" I mean some combination of Charna, the training center teachers and a commission of veteran improvisers... not, you know, a magical sorting hat). Over time teams get better (or worse) performance slots and have members added (or taken away). This can go on anywhere from two schedules to, say, six years, before a team is inevitably cut. A few rare teams decide to retire, but most teams just get cut.

This is how the theater juggles the massive number of paying students wanting to perform, the sizable number of long-term performers, and quality control. It's an imperfect juggling act, some performers end up feeling alienated, and sometimes some shows are terrible. But some performers flourish and some shows are amazing. Most of us are in the middle.

This old paper schedule from 1995 is taped up in the downstairs light booth (or at least it was until the recent repainting). There are 19 teams listed (there are, I think, 28 these days). My non-expert eyes recognize about 20 names, two of them pretty famous, maybe six of them still performing in Chicago, and two or three of them still improvise at iO sporadically.

Diplomat Motel has some really good slots on the new schedule.